The purpose of this Practice Brief is to understand the relationship between health information management and consumer/patient engagement, and examine how HIM professionals can advance and support engagement. Its focus is on policies and practices that enable the individual’s access to and use of health information.

In 2001, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) emphasized the need for patients to have greater control over their health information. We describe a Boston healthcare system’s approach to providing patients....

Walk into any midsize medical practice and you’ll see firsthand that technology is reshaping healthcare. The move to electronic health records has gone beyond the tipping point, while mobile technologies are revolutionizing information sharing. Yet despite the array of technology at....

HIM professionals are familiar with the HIPAA privacy rule, the federal law that serves to safeguard protected health information. However, they may be less familiar with the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA, 20 USC 1232g; CFR Part 99), which is also relevant to managing the pr....

A rapidly aging global population in many industrialized countries accompanied by an increase in chronic diseases and the high cost of managing such diseases has led many to turn to a technological solution to ease the burden on healthcare professionals and provide useful tools to the elde....

The federal government advocates the practice of routinely providing an after-visit summary (AVS) to patients after each office-based visit as an element of stage 1 meaningful use. A significant potential benefit of the AVS is improved patient engagement achieved by enabl....

Determining how to implement privacy regulations and policies in an electronic record environment can not only be daunting but also thought of quite late in the EHR implementation process. Daily processes and tasks such as reviewing the medical record with patients to processing requests for a....